The purple cape flapped in the wind, rain hitting her face and running down along the golden mask. On that fun-house-mirror-like curved surface, a blood-red reflection shimmered.
She straightened up, wiped the Dagger on her glove, and looked up at the sky choked with dark clouds.
Gotham always seemed to be like this.
"Tear it up."
Bone Breaker carried out Charise's order without hesitation. She was one meter ninety tall, ninety-nine kilos, not fat at all, but for a woman, that body packed with big slabs of muscle from head to toe made her look especially vicious.
She strode toward the pile of bloody "stuff" on the ground. It was always like this: the criminals Miss Charise got bored of playing with were usually handed over to her big hands to take out the trash.
Before this, the Humiliation Squad really had been planning to hunt criminals in Gotham tonight, just as Batman had predicted.
It's just that plans never keep up with changes, and they'd also run into an It-type.
If they hadn't seen it, that'd be one thing. But to ram head-on into that kind of monster in a dark alley, they couldn't just stand by and watch.
They couldn't handle an It-type as easily as Su Ming did, but at least it was easier for them than for the Teen Titans.
The Fallen Knight could be seen as a bootleg Batman, just nerfed across the board. Charise didn't even need to think about how she should "develop" herself—just watch the secretly recorded videos of Batman fighting, and then build every toy Batman had, one by one.
Batmobile? She had the Knight Vehicle. Bat Plane? She had the Knight Flying Device. All kinds of Bat Darts? She had Flying Knives with every effect you could think of.
If you had to say where she was weaker, it'd be that she was much younger than Batman, lacked experience, and she didn't have those top-tier toys in the Bat Cave.
Like no Brother Eye, no Final Machine, and none of the other rare gadgets, like Amber Gold, the Dionysus Factor, Kryptonite, the Justice League Communicator, that kind of stuff.
But that was only because she hadn't seen those things. Once she laid eyes on them and understood what they were for, her cash-slinging power could get the job done fast.
As for the bootleg Wonder Woman and the bootleg Hawk Woman on the team, their combat strength wasn't bad either. Dealing with an It-type was no problem. It's just that only Katastrophe's wings were made of N Metal, so their killing power had its limits.
The It-type was immune to Divine Child's toxins, but that was fine. Divine Child hadn't been idle during his time in Arkham—he'd self-studied medicine and hacking, turning himself into a universal support.
He could fight too, specialized in street-fighting techniques, and could proficiently use every hot and cold Weapon on Earth.
And his support capability went without saying. A guy good at poison plus medical knowledge—sure, he wasn't a professional doctor, couldn't do things like Midnite Strange Doctor cutting out a tumor with chopsticks or using a Lighter to fix a fracture, but Divine Child was at least just a notch below Ah Fu's level.
A squad like this—can fight, can tank, can think, and has strong endurance. As long as they didn't run into Batman, they could basically walk sideways across Gotham.
As the heir of an old-line Gotham family, Charise naturally knew Batman's true identity. Everyone knew everyone else's dirty laundry here. She even knew about the two Batwoman from the Kane family.
But like any sane person, she firmly refused to get involved in Batman and Joker's little game. This wasn't the time. They usually just tangled with Barbara instead.
Charise figured Barbara could run with the Birds of Prey—those people were killing as well—so she'd been constantly trying to tempt Barbara into breaking her no-kill rule, repeatedly trying to recruit her into Humiliation.
Bone Breaker had already balled the silent criminal up and forcibly shoved him down through the little hole in the manhole cover into the sewer. A kindly smile appeared on her face.
Former cop Katastrophe was busy spreading her wings and rinsing them in the rain. The It-type's blood was a bit sticky and reeked, hard to clean off, and she completely ignored the slaughter right in front of her.
As for Divine Child, even more so. He was actually watching the meat paste squeeze through the little hole with a hint of envy. Dressed in a red suit and holding a black umbrella, he stood off to the side.
"You kids wait a bit, mommy's working." Bone Breaker said with a smile to the air next to her. Then, still smiling, she walked to Charise at the mouth of the alley, who was watching the rain. "Miss, it's taken care of."
Charise rolled her shoulders and hitched the cape higher. She took out something that looked like a phone and scrolled through the satellite images on it.
Her method was quicker. Even though she had backup artificial satellites of her own, this weather looked in no way suitable for launching a Rocket.
But there was always someone launching satellites on Earth.
After the flood, Earth was now very "clean." All the invisible telecom signals in the air, radio waves, Quantum Rays, whatever—gone. It was practically like the Stone Age had come back.
And the signals that still existed, the ones that went out of the atmosphere after the flood, stuck out like lice on a bald man's head.
All she had to do was set up some signal amplifiers, let her portable terminal hitch a ride on someone else's signal, then have Divine Child hack his way in.
This was basic stuff. Anyone with a bit of skill was hacking military satellites for intel every other day.
With the FBI and the Ministry of Defense's "ability," the satellites under their protection were basically like public toilets in New York Central Park to Superhero and Villain alike—anyone could walk in.
The flood had been over for a few hours now. In that window, the number of forces that had managed to launch satellites into space was very limited. Recognizing a satellite of the Celestial Eye Association, Divine Child wisely passed on it and finally hacked into an artificial satellite that was about thirty years behind the times.
Charise couldn't quite wrap her head around it. By rights, any force that could relaunch an artificial satellite in such a short time, even if they couldn't exactly cover the sky with one hand, should at least be loaded. So why would they send a piece-of-junk outdated satellite into orbit? What the hell kind of operation was that?
And the transmission encoding on these signals is ancient, anyone could crack it. Who the hell is out there doing good deeds, putting a public-use satellite up in the sky for free?
The signal kept cutting in and out, the picture looked like a penguin one second and a giraffe the next, but that was already enough for Charise. It was intel falling from the sky anyway, and her analytical skills were more than enough to piece together these fragmented images.
"Batman is heading our way." Charise saw some trajectories. Batman's black camouflage actually works pretty well, but it's a whole different story when you're up against a satellite.
From high up looking down, a black ant on black ground really is hard to spot, but once that ant starts crawling all over the place, a moving object is always eye-catching.
"Nosy bastard! Don't go catch criminals, come after us for what?!" Bone Breaker slammed the wall beside the alley hard, venting the frustration in her chest.
The wall instantly caved in, leaving a big hole through which you could see the furnishings of the home inside.
Behind her golden mask, Charise narrowed her eyes and thought for a few seconds: "Divine Child, have Katastrophe take you up high on both sides of the alley and set up Water-Soluble Venom Type I. Go light on the dosage, don't kill him."
"Copy, boss." The Black teenager tilted his head to trap the umbrella on his shoulder, then pulled open his suit. The lining was full of tiny compartments, each crammed with test tubes.
He drew out six or seven of them and started mixing on the spot, his hands moving so fast that a complex compound of toxins was blended in under two seconds. Every venom he used was ineffective on himself, so he could swagger around with all these materials on his person.
The Fallen Knight, meanwhile, began pulling things from her belt—EMP trip-mines for disabling vehicles. She sent Bone Breaker to plant them at the end of the street, while she herself placed a whole pile of gadgets at various points in the alley according to the calculations from the 3D simulation in her mind.
That's where she had the edge over Batman. As a student trained by a serial killer, she was extremely good at setting hunting traps—not the kind you use in a rainforest, the kind you use to kill people.
It was just that she didn't want to kill Batman, which put a serious cap on her creativity. Tech like micro-nuclear bombs or black hole bombs, she owned that stuff too, but there was no way she could bring it out to play.
They fought for justice, and unlike other anti-heroes, they did their best to avoid harming civilians in battle, and also to avoid damage to public property.
So Charise's hand skimmed over the portable nuke on her belt, then over the incendiary bombs, the C4, the TNT, grenades and shells, and finally picked up a small handgun instead, a 9mm Beretta 92F with full-auto capability.
One hand holding the pistol, the other gripping a remote, she waited until all four of them had returned to the alley, then activated the traps she'd laid down.
She'd done the math: if Batman chased them in a straight line, just running into this mess of traps would leave him at least seriously injured and unconscious.
"Move. Fall back east along the straight street."
East Gotham was the coastal Old Harbor District, which was Charise's turf. On the surface it looked like nothing but unfinished buildings and salty wasteland, but down below she'd already built a very complex system of fortifications and transit tunnels.
The bunker, like the Hall of Justice, was built to deal with Cosmic Level threats. Even if Darkseid came back again, it could hold up for a while.
Her squad was very obedient with her. Her brand of crazy wasn't the same as Batman's—she could manually switch personalities by putting on or taking off her mask, and she wasn't nearly as paranoid.
She was both their bankroll and their friend, and her belief in purifying Gotham was identical to the team's. As the brains of the Humiliation Squad, she was the one person no one ever questioned.
The four of them moved silently through the dark alley. She wasn't the least bit surprised that Batman could find them under these conditions. The only thing she couldn't quite figure out was who was in that beat-up second-hand car. Why did it look like that car was actually leading the way?
"Close. Get ready..." Fallen Knight muttered an order as she pretended to leave with her head down, eyes still glued to the terminal. Bone Breaker clenched her fists—once the fight started, she would charge in first as the meat shield.
But just as their nerves were stretched tight and the car on the satellite map drew closer and closer to the Bat, the car suddenly turned at another intersection and headed south, toward the city's south side.
Charise: "...Threat neutralized."
"Wasn't he coming for us?" Katastrophe asked with a face full of confusion. As a former officer and member of the Gotham PD SWAT, she had pretty solid tactical instincts.
She could feel that the car and the Bat had originally been heading straight for them, but then it was like they suddenly changed their minds, and that locked-on sensation just vanished.
Why?
The Fallen Knight had them go disarm the traps, so they wouldn't accidentally hurt pedestrians tomorrow. She herself just stood there in the rain, quietly thinking.
Anything Katastrophe could sense, she could sense too. It was like they'd suddenly been removed from the target list. Why? They clearly hadn't entered visual range, so why change plans?
"Oh, so that's how it is...."
All of a sudden she heard a voice right by her ear, and then a red-and-blue head plopped down onto her shoulder, watching the terminal screen along with her.
"Dr. Quizer?" Katastrophe finally noticed that at some point the buildings on either side of where she'd been standing had been wrapped in plant vines, and huge car-wheel-sized flowers were silently blooming in the night....
The faint fragrance wasn't obvious under the cover of rain, but by the time she noticed it, it already meant she'd been dosed by Poison Ivy's toxins.
Harley clearly couldn't care less how dangerous Poison Ivy was to other people right now. She wrapped an arm around Charise affectionately, laughed out loud, and planted a kiss on her golden face armor.
"Yup, little Charise cutie, I'm back. Miss me?"